now, George! You didn't say anything about it to Mr.
Overbrook, did you?"

"No! Gee! No! Honest, I didn't! Just made a bluff about having him to
lunch some time."

"Well.... Oh, dear.... I don't want to hurt their feelings. But I
don't see how I could stand another evening like this one. And suppose
somebody like Dr. and Mrs. Angus came in when we had the Overbrooks
there, and thought they were friends of ours!"

For a week they worried, "We really ought to invite Ed and his wife,
poor devils!" But as they never saw the Overbrooks, they forgot them,
and after a month or two they said, "That really was the best way, just
to let it slide. It wouldn't be kind to THEM to have them here. They'd
feel so out of place and hard-up in our home."

They did not speak of the Overbrooks again.

CHAPTER XVI

THE certainty that he was not going to be accepted by the McKelveys made
Babbitt feel guilty and a little absurd. But he went more regularly to
the Elks; at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon he was oratorical regarding
the wickedness of strikes; and again he saw himself as a Prominent
Citizen.

His clubs and associations were food comfortable to his spirit.

Of a decent man in Zenith it was required that he should belong to
one, preferably two or three, of the innumerous "lodges" and
prosperity-boosting lunch-clubs; to the Rotarians, the Kiwanis, or the
Boosters; to the Oddfellows, Moose, Masons, Red Men, Woodmen, Owls,
Eagles, Maccabees, Knights of Pythias, Knights of Columbus, and other
secret orders characterized by a high degree of heartiness, sound
morals, and reverence for the Constitution. There were four reasons for
joining these orders: It was the thing to do. It was good for business,
since lodge-brothers frequently became customers. It gave to Americans
unable to become Geheimrate or Commendatori such unctuous honorifics as
High Worthy Recording Scribe and Grand Hoogow to add to the commonplace
distinctions of Colonel, Judge, and Professor. And it permitted the
swaddled American husband to stay away from home for one evening a week.
The lodge was his piazza, his pavement cafe. He could shoot pool and
talk man-talk and be obscene and valiant.

Babbitt was what he called a "joiner" for all these reasons.

Behind the gold and scarlet banner of his public achievements was the
dun background of office-routine: leases, sales-contracts, lists of
properties to rent. The evenings of oratory and committees and lodg